Generating Formatting Objects

You can use Stylus Studio to develop a stylesheet that generates XSL Formatting Objects (FO). In the scenario in which you apply such a stylesheet, you can specify that Stylus Studio should run a Formatting Objects Processor (FOP) on the stylesheet's result document. When you apply the stylesheet and preview the results, Stylus Studio displays the formatted results.

Stylus Studio includes The Apache Software Organization's FOP, and it is configured to always generate PDF. If you want to run a FOP to generate some other type of output, you must specify some other FOP in the
Custom post-process fields of the
Post-process tab of the
Scenario Properties dialog box.

Stylus Studio includes two sample stylesheets that generate formatting objects. These files are in the
examples\XSLFormattingObjects directory of your Stylus Studio installation directory.

FO is a W3C recommendation for an XML vocabulary that describes how to format text. FO is one part of XSL. This section assumes that you are familiar with FO. For additional information about FO, see
http://www.w3.org/TR/2001/REC-xsl-20011015/.